by David Wise
The Department of Defense has declined to make any comment about Operation SHOCKER. For four years, the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), in Fort Meade, Maryland, insisted in response to several Freedom of Information Act requests by the author that it had “no record” of Operation SHOCKER under that or any of the several other code names used for the operation over more than two decades. As far as the army was concerned, it never existed. At the author’s behest, Kenneth H. Bacon, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, asked the secretary of the army, Togo D. West, Jr., whether any information about the operation could be released. West ordered a review. On May 27, 1997, Bacon responded to the author, saying that the files had indeed been located but remained classified and would not be released. When subsequently pressed, Bacon said, “There is a security issue here.” He declined to elaborate.
Strecker was assigned from 1965 to 1968 to the army’s Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (OACSI, but often called just ACSI and referred to in-house as “ohax-see” or “ax-see”). His successor was Taro Yoshihashi.
CHAPTER 7
In 1985, Polyakov was betrayed to the KGB by the CIA’s Aldrich H. Ames, and three years later he was executed.
Although Danilin did not explain why the microdots were in plain text and the SW encoded, the logic was not hard to follow. If one of the hollow rocks left for Cassidy was somehow found-by a child playing, for example-the finder would not see the microdot, and the piece of paper would appear blank. Encoding the text of the SW provided another layer of security.
The dictionary had 413 pages set in two columns of type. The Soviets instructed Cassidy that the first three digits indicated the page number, always between 100 and 413, the fourth digit indicated the column, and the last two digits indicated the placement of the word.
Now, however, the code became a little more complicated. Because the fourth digit of his birth date was number 5, the number given to Cassidy always had a 5, 6, or 7 as the fourth digit, so that the sum when added to 5 would indicate column one or two. For example, one actual message Cassidy received contained the number 135685, which, added to his birth date, produced 198205, which meant the word “last.” The next number was 249692, which, added to his birth date, resulted in 312212, which led to the word “Saturday.” The message also included 152685, which, when added to his birth date, produced 215205, indicating the word “March.” Thus the numbers were part of a message scheduling a meeting in New York City for the last Saturday in March, 1975. The code was laborious to translate, but it worked.
Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, 94th Congress, vol. 1, “Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents,” p. 19. The dart, which the CIA preferred to call “a nondiscernible microbioinoculator,” was fired by a noiseless dart gun, accurate up to 250 feet. The victim would feel nothing when struck, and no trace of the microscopic dart would be found through any later medical examination of the dead person. The agency also stockpiled cobra venom.
Charles L. Hatheway, “Toxigenic Clostridia,” Clinical Microbiology Reviews 3 (January 1990): 71.
Whether the information about ricin was passed to the Soviets, either in the deception phase of SHOCKER or in a separate, parallel counterintelligence operation, is not clear. In 1985, Vitaly S. Yurchenko, a senior KGB official, told the CIA about Special Lab 100, a laboratory in Moscow where KGB scientists developed and tested poisons for operational use. The Russians may have thus extracted ricin on their own.
CHAPTER 8
Formerly Stalingrad, the river port city was devastated in World War II, but the surrender of Hitler’s forces there in 1943 was the turning point for the Soviet army, which then went on the offensive along the eastern front.
In both the United States and Russia, the chemists in the pilot plants typically worked with small quantities and attempted to devise the processes that would take place in a full-scale plant. In a full-scale production plant, chemical engineers turned out nerve gas by the hundreds of pounds or tons. At Edgewood, nerve gases were tested initially in a process laboratory, even before the work moved to a pilot plant.
Pinacolyl alcohol combined with methyl phosphonofluoridate creates soman, or pinacolyl methyl phosphonofluoridate. The second chemical component of soman is identical to that used in sarin; only the alcohol is different.
Mirzayanov’s theory about why the fish died might be correct, but full-scale production of soman had not yet begun in 1965, the year the fish kill occurred. The electrolysis plant that was needed to produce the necessary pinacolyl alcohol was still under construction at the time, and major production of soman at Volgograd did not begin until 1968.
CHAPTER 9
In May 1961, John M. Doar, an official of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, was on the scene in Montgomery when the Freedom Riders were beaten with baseball bats and lead pipes at the Greyhound bus station. Doar also went to St. Jude’s to investigate the threats against the hospital. Sister Miriam greatly admired Doar “because he protected St. Jude’s. John spent part of one night by the switchboard with me listening to the threats. He had a set of earphones and could listen to the calls coming in.” In 1974, Doar was counsel to the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach President Richard Nixon.
CHAPTER 10
In From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, popularized SMERSH as “the official murder organization of the Soviet government.” In fact, during World War II, the Soviet army did have special units called SMERSH to spy on the armed forces, liquidate disloyal elements, and track down Nazi agents.
The KGB went out of existence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. In Russia, the spy organization split into two principal parts: The Russian foreign intelligence service, the old First Chief Directorate, became the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki (SVR), which carries out espionage abroad. The Federal Security Service (FSK, later the FSB) became the successor to the KGB’s internal-security and counterintelligence departments.
Although the FBI sometimes conducts surveillances abroad in espionage cases, if it informs the local intelligence service, the risk of a leak increases. If it does not do so, and the foreign government discovers it, there may be unpleasant diplomatic repercussions. Moreover, the CIA is unhappy when the FBI operates in foreign countries, since foreign-intelligence operations are primarily its responsibility.
In recognition of his service, the Soviet government awarded a lifetime pension to his widow and money to his children, Oleg, the future spy, and his sister, Neonila, until they completed their educations. Likhachev’s father-in-law, Ivan A. Likhachev, was a major player in the industrial development of the Soviet Union and ran the Stalin automobile factory for years. He was familiar with American automobile production and design, having toured all the major auto plants in the United States during the early 1930s. He had even worked at Ford plants in the United States for two years.
CHAPTER 11
Cassidy had thirty days’ leave every year and could get away almost any time, but the Soviets may have reasoned that it would look normal for him to travel around holidays.
TP stood for “Tampa.” He was also given another coded designation, TP510-OA. The last two letters stood for “operational asset.”
Xerxes, the Persian king, was only indirectly the source of the code name. Peterson rode into headquarters every day with an FBI agent whose initials were F.X. and whose nickname was Xerxes. The name popped into Peterson’s head as he was casting about for a new cryptonym. Although Peterson had his own reasons for the phonetic variation, the FBI sometimes deliberately skews code words to give them added security. A mole inside the FBI who overheard the code name ZYRKSEEZ for example, would very likely look in files under the letter X and not find it.
CHAPTER 12
It was in October 1968, while Lopez worked for the Olympic Committee, that Cassidy attended the games
in Mexico City and waited in vain in the barrio for the Soviet contact who never came.
Mexico: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1971; 3d ed., 1979. The title translates as The Chicanos: An Exploited National Minority. Lopez has also been published in English. See The Chicanos: Life and Struggles of the Mexican Minority in the United States (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973).
Although PALMETTO was the FBI code name for the Lopez phase of the operation, the term was used interchangeably to refer to the case, to Lopez himself, or in plural form to Lopez and his wife, Alicia.
Tetrahydroxyquinone is an organic compound used in chemistry as a titration indicator to detect the presence of barium and other substances.
One-time pads, usually no bigger than a postage stamp, are printed on nitrated cellulose, which burns instantly. A spy receiving a message in encoded five-digit groups first subtracts the random numbers on the one-time pad and then converts the resulting total into words from a matrix containing the letters of the alphabet. Each page is used only once and burned. Since only two copies of the pad exist, one in Moscow and one in the possession of the spy, the codes are virtually unbreakable.
CHAPTER 13
Whoever wrote the parol probably did not know English very well and used “That’s Rex” instead of “This is Rex. . . .”
The letter would almost certainly arrive after the attack had begun, making it only marginally useful. In a bizarre touch, if the date of the likely attack was more than a week in the future, Cassidy was instructed only to mail a letter to Freundlich rather than use the telephone at all. To the FBI, the Soviet plan did not make a lot of sense. Apparently, the GRU had much more faith in the postal service than do most Americans.
Ixora, often grown in greenhouses, is named after the Hindu deity Isvara.
Maxwell’s financial empire was collapsing at the time of his mysterious death in November 1991. Maxwell, sixty-eight, disappeared during the night from his hundred-foot yacht in the Atlantic, near the Canary Islands. His body was found hours later, floating in the sea. Although Spanish authorities said Maxwell had died of a heart attack, his death was ruled a suicide by Lloyd’s of London, which refused to pay his insurance. To support its conclusion, Lloyd’s noted that Maxwell had asked his private jet to circle the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, on November 4, the last full day of his life, as though in a final salute.
On November 14, 1991, shortly after Maxwell’s death, The Times of London reported that the British Foreign Office was investigating allegations that the Soviet Communist Party had aided Pergamon Press financially by placing it in the category of “friendly firms” that were given priority in settling Soviet debts.
DEFCON stands for “defense condition.” There are five categories of alerts. The lower the number, the greater the level of readiness. For example, DEFCON 5 is the normal state of alert; DEFCON 2 means war is imminent; and DEFCON 1 means hostilities have begun. On May 8, when U.S. forces went to DEFCON 4, the Pacific Command was already at DEFCON 3 because of the Vietnam War.
If officials at headquarters did weigh the risk, they did not communicate this to the Tampa office, according to Jack O’Flaherty.
CHAPTER 14
At the time, Americans were just becoming accustomed to security precautions at domestic airports. Six months earlier, on December 15, 1972, the FAA had imposed the rule that all passengers and carry-on baggage be screened by metal detectors and X-ray machines or searched by hand.
On the face of it, the parol seemed fairly wacky, since both Maryland cities were more than two hundred miles away. Perhaps Danilin, being unfamiliar with the geography of New York, simply stuck to locations he knew. On the other hand, in the unlikely event that the Soviet spy went up to the wrong person—not too many people would be walking around Brooklyn with a pipe and a yellow package—whoever was approached would certainly not recommend a movie theater in Rockville. Conversely, in the one-in-a-million chance that a real stranger came up to Cassidy and asked directions to a drive-in theater, his reply would be so baffling that there certainly would be no danger of Cassidy mistaking the person for his Soviet contact.
CHAPTER 15
At the time of the Pentagon ceremony the former U.S. commander in Vietnam was suffering from lung cancer, but it would not be diagnosed for another two months. He underwent surgery in June to remove his left lung but died on September 4, 1974, at age fifty-nine.
CHAPTER 16
The title of his dissertation was “Conquest and Resistance: The Origin of the Chicano National Minority in the Nineteenth Century (A Marxist View).”
“Pachuco is a term for a cool guy, a Mexican American in the 1940s who wore zoot suits and was considered a hipster,” according to Lisa Navarrete, director of public information for the National Council of La Raza.
In 1993, the intelligence division was renamed the national security division.
CHAPTER 17
The Washington Post, July 31, 1997, p. A13.
There was reason to believe that the material passed to the Soviets by Joe Cassidy was not legally declassified. “If we did declassify a document passed to the Soviets,” said one former counterintelligence official, “we would have to declassify every copy and every other document like it. If the Soviets ever managed to obtain a second copy stamped ‘declassified,’ they’d know we were playing games.”
Even two decades later, with the cold war over, the two Justice Department attorneys were not eager to talk about the PALMETTO case. Martin refused to comment. Tafe, still a lawyer in the internal-security section, declined to speak on the record.
Under the 1972 Supreme Court ruling outlawing capital punishment, there was no death penalty for espionage from that year until 1994, when Congress, in the wake of the Aldrich Ames spy case, restored the penalty if certain criteria were met. (The Supreme Court restored capital punishment in the states in 1976.) Had the Lopezes been convicted of espionage in 1978, they could have been sentenced to a prison term of any number of years or life, but they would not have faced the death penalty.
The espionage statutes generally bar disclosure not of “classified information” but of “information relating to the national defense.” Since 1951, documents have been classified by presidential executive orders, not by law. In practice, since the 1960s, the Justice Department has generally taken the position that data must be classified at the level of secret or above to fall within the definition of “national defense” information. But the statute does not require that the documents be classified. Under the language of the espionage laws, therefore, even if the material left in the rocks had technically been “declassified,” that would not necessarily bar the prosecution of a person who retrieved it and passed it to a foreign power.
The official report that Parker filed afterward, known as a 302 report, summarized the interview: “RIVAS was shown photographs of both he and his wife engaged in espionage activities. . . . Upon viewing the photographs he stated, ‘You have all of the evidence.’ RIVAS further admitted that he was a Soviet agent. . . . RIVAS said he decided to work actively against the United States at a very young age. He explained that he could have become a terrorist or do nothing to help his country. But he decided to work for the Soviets in order to make a positive effort.”
The requirement that the FISA court approve break-ins to conduct physical searches in foreign-intelligence cases, except in places such as embassies, was added to the law by Congress in 1994, following the arrest of CIA mole Aldrich Ames. Beginning in June 1993, the FBI wiretapped Ames’s home with a FISA court warrant. On October 9, again with a FISA warrant, bureau agents entered his house to bug the rooms while the Ameses were out of town attending a wedding in Pensacola, Florida. During the same entry, the FBI also searched the premises and downloaded his computer without a warrant, acting on the authority of Attorney General Janet Reno. Had the case gone to trial, Ames’s lawyer, Plato Cacheris, was prepared to test the warrantless search. Ames, however, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espiona
ge, and there was no court case.
Robert L. Keuch, a deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division during the PALMETTO investigation, says he would take that view. “Once you’ve made a pinhole, I think you’ve entered.”
Both were convicted and fined for violating the civil rights of the persons whose homes were searched; they were pardoned by President Reagan in April 1981.
Humphrey and Truong were convicted of spying for Vietnam. They were each sentenced to fifteen years.
CHAPTER 18
When the CIA began losing agents inside the Soviet Union in 1985, for example, the agency first grasped at the possibility that poor tradecraft by the agents or a code break explained the losses. Only much later did the CIA face up to the probability that there was a mole within, a Russian spy who turned out to be Aldrich Ames. Partly because of the institutional reluctance to think the unthinkable, it took nine years to catch him.
The entertainer, then twenty-six, was billed as Kathie Lee Johnson at the time.
This time Cassidy did not conceal the rock at a drop site, since his instructions did not specify one.
Both the KGB and the GRU recalled anyone who had been pitched by a Western intelligence service, in order to remove the officer from any temptation. Failure to report a pitch was regarded as a very serious offense.
CHAPTER 19
The rock, as big as a house, is located to the north of a playground in an area of the park known as “The Dene,” a British term for a dune or sandy area near the seashore. The rustic shelter that sits atop the rock formation now was not there at the time that IXORA was active.